06 February 2009

Ghost Dog: Or, How I Wrote My First Novel

Author Randall Kenan is inspired by people and places in the rural South.

By Randall Kenan

Randall Kenan’s critically acclaimed works include A Visitation of Spirits (1989) and Let the Dead Bury the Dead (1992). He traveled America for several years, interviewing African Americans from every walk of life to write Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (2000). His most recent book, The Fire This Time (2007) is a timely homage to James Baldwin. Kenan teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

I.

I never saw the ghost dog, but I can see it, nonetheless. Some said it was actually a wolf, grey with flashing red eyes. Some said it was a very large “sooner” (a southern term for mongrel or mutt, meaning “as soon this breed as it is that breed”). But in reports about ghost dog sightings, people remarked that the dog was white, ghostly so, and more often than not a shepherd, the kind with a keen nose and pointy ears. Noble. Resolute.

In every account I heard as a child, the dog was always helpful: My great-great-aunt told of how the dog had led her out of the woods once when she was lost. There was even a long story featuring my own great-great-grandmother, a storm, a mule, a broken-down cart, and the heroic ghost dog. One woman reported being set upon by a pack of canines and how this beautiful white dog leapt to her rescue, appearing out of nowhere, and escorted her safely home. When she turned around in her doorway, the dog had vanished.

The sightings always occurred along a particular stretch of asphalt highway — once a trail for Native Americans, then a dirt road, and, by the time I was a boy, a main route to the beach. Highway 50 cut through an astounding forest of old-growth timber. Oak. Poplar. Pine. Especially the majestic, soaring, massive-limbed longleaf pine that has recently become endangered. For me, as a child, this forest was primordial, full of mysteries, dangers, witches and goblins, and all manner of wonders I had read about in Grimm’s fairy tales. And that amazing white dog. The dog I had never seen. But he lived in my imagination. He still does.

It makes perfect sense to me, now, that one day I would write about that ghost dog and that world of southeastern North Carolina. Duplin County. Chinquapin. A town of only a couple of hundred souls. Farmers, poultry factory workers, marine base laborers, largely. But that seeming inevitability was not so obvious to me at the time.

II.

When I first left my small, ghost-haunted North Carolina town, I matriculated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the nation’s oldest public university, a bastion of classical thinking, progressive social thinking, high art, and most important for me at the time: scientific thought. My goal in those days: to become a physicist. My interest in science had been provoked by my having gotten lost for hours in space operas like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Frank Herbert’s Dune, in Star Trek and fantasies about alien cultures and faster-than-light travel, black holes, worm holes, and cool ray guns. (I’ll never forget the day my physics advisor said to me when I was a junior: “I think you really want to be a science fiction writer, my boy.” When I took umbrage, trying to explain away my C in differential calculus, he quickly said to me, “There is no shame in being a writer. More scientists,” he said, “would be writers, if they could. So be grateful you can,” he told me.)

Truth to tell, my interest in science fiction led me to study creative writing, and studying writing led me to the study of literature. But we are talking about the high falutin, canonical type of literature, Charles Dickens and F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Makepeace Thackeray. It became clear to me early on that there was an orthodoxy afoot here. Being in the American South, and at a premiere southern American university, southern literature was king and queen: Thomas Wolfe. William Faulkner. Flannery O’Connor. Richard Wright. Eudora Welty. Southern literature meant social realism. These were the iconic figures held up to us aspiring young southern writers. Any penchant for the phantasmagorical was met with discouragement. Ridiculed even. Real writers, good writers, wrote about the world as it was. “Write what you know” was the mantra of the creative writing courses nestled in the bosom of the English Department, and my major, by my senior year, was no longer physics but English. I was writing what I knew. I knew about ghost dogs.

III.

Ten things about Chinquapin:
1. Soybean fields
2. Two black Baptist churches
3. Rattlesnakes
4. Turkey houses
5. Cucumber fields
6. Deer
7. Summertime family reunions
8. Tobacco barns
9. September revival meetings
10. Cotton-mouth moccasins

IV.

 

A tobacco barn in the countryside of the American South.

A tobacco barn in the countryside of the American South.

When I arrived at Chapel Hill in the fall of 1981, the percentage of African Americans was in the single digits — around 4 or 5 percent. Yet those hundreds among thousands made their presence known. For whatever reason, most of my closest friends were fellow African Americans. Was it a need for familiarity? A sense of bonding? The comfort of kin? To be sure, I had many good, close, and true white friends — and Japanese and Hispanic and Indian friends, and with many of whom I am still close — but the gravity of African-American culture drew me. I wrote for the black student newspaper. I sang in the Black Student Movement Gospel Choir.

I never felt any actual pressure to “write black.” I had great respect for the Gospel of Social Realism and its Canon, and I knew it well. But for every autobiographical story I turned in to workshop, I would also pen a story featuring a root worker (a practitioner of African-American Folk Magic) or a space station or a talking dog. Moreover, by that time, I had encountered three writers who gave me what I like to call permission.

The best training any writer can receive is reading, reading, and more reading. Even more than writing, this is also essential. And though I drank down the aforementioned canonical writers of the South with great alacrity, and added to that mix a deep investigation of the Great African-American Book of Fiction — Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks — I would stumble upon writers beyond those garden walls who had enormous impact on the way I looked at the world of prose fiction. Issac Bashevis Singer. Yukio Mishima. Anthony Burgess. Writers who were not, at first glance, the obvious heroes of a young black man from rural, southeastern North Carolina.

It was Toni Morrison, already popular, but years before Beloved and the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel, who taught me something of mind-opening importance. With few exceptions, African-American literature fell under the umbrella of “protest” literature, going back to the 19th century and the plethora of famous slave narratives. Even as late as 1970, the year Morrison’s first novel was published, most important African-American novels dealt largely with issues of civil rights and social justice for black people. But Morrison took as her primary subject matter black folks themselves, not racism or politics. She instead chose to focus on personal and family dynamics, matters of the heart and soul. In her world, the perspective of white folk could go unmentioned for hundreds of pages. For my 18-year-old mind this was a revelation.

The writings of the great Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez were my first introduction to what has become popularly known as magical realism. I would never be the same again. (In his Nobel lecture, García Márquez stressed that there is nothing fantastical about his work, the world he writes about is uncompromisingly real. I understood right away exactly what he meant.) Here was a writer who wrote about ghosts and a town suffering from mass amnesia and storms of butterflies and women flying up to heaven with the same matter-of-fact language of social realism — in fact his three favorite writers are Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Virginia Woolf. 

Zora Neale Hurston, whose long-neglected works were just beginning to be rediscovered when I was in college, hit me like a neutron

bomb. Here was this trained anthrolopologist, this Floridian, this African American, who seamlessly integrated folklore with folklife, social realism with the fantastic. Like Morrison, who learned much from Hurston, she did not put the politics of race above the existential essence of black culture. 

Song of Solomon. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Their Eyes Were Watching God. It was as if they were collectively saying: Go write ahead, boy. Do your own thing.

For my honors thesis, I turned in several chapters of a proposed novel set in a small North Carolina town very like Chinquapin called Tims Creek. It featured a young lawyer, a native son, who had become a successful Washington, D.C., lawyer. But one fateful summer when he returns to Tims Creek full of a certain emotional turmoil, he runs across a root worker who curses (blesses?) him, and the next night, in the full moon, he becomes a werewolf! I called it “Ashes Don’t Burn.”

Mercy, mercy, me.

V.

Imagine what it is like to have as your first job out of college working for the publisher of two of your literary heroes. Alfred A. Knopf. New York City. The long-time publisher of Toni Morrison. The new publisher of Gabriel García Márquez. 1985. I would soon become the assistant to the editor of the author of Love in the Time of Cholera. For an aspiring writer, this was like studying at the feet of Merlin.

But there was another education happening for me. I would come to spend years living in Queens and then Brooklyn. I was now rubbing shoulders daily, in the subways, on the streets, in the stores, and eventually in homes, with black folk from all over the African Diaspora. I got to know black people from Ghana and Trinidad and Haiti and Toronto and Houston, Texas. This exposure challenged all those closely held notions of what it means to be black, and made me look back at the world in which I had initially grown up with brand-new eyes. Suddenly the fish fries, the out-of-tune church choirs, the hours spent toiling under the sun in tobacco fields, Vacation Bible School, hog killings, and stories of ghost dogs became important somehow, important to be written about. 

“Ashes Don’t Burn” had one fundamental flaw, and, in hindsight, I thank my teachers back at social realism-saturated UNC [University of North Carolina] for helping me to realize that roadblock. The impediment had nothing to do with lycanthropy. Simply put: I was not a thirtysomething lawyer going through a crisis upon returning home. I was not writing what I “knew.” But I had been a boy in that same home, so, by and by, the narrative I had been laboring over changed. I kept the supernatural cast that I’m sure inhabited those dark woods. The landscape did not change at all, in fact it probably richened and deepened, partly from my nostalgia for it, and as a response to the six-billion-footed city, dreaming of the woods and the deer and the cornfields. 

The story I scribbled at doggedly, in the evenings, on subways, on the weekends, would ultimately be published in the summer of 1989 as A Visitation of Spirits. There are no ghost dogs in it, amazingly, but plenty of other ghosts and creatures, spirits of the world and of the mind, mingled in with a healthy dose of social realism as I had been scrupulously taught, and which I respect with great admiration.

For me, now, this approach seems inevitable. Right. The only way for me to do it. Yet the path toward that fictional vision was neither straight nor easily achieved, but worth every twist and bend and cul-de-sac.

I hope to return to lycanthropy one day soon. There is something in that mythology that fits well in Tims Creek, in Chinquapin. And of course, soon and very soon, I hope a ghost dog will make an appearance in one my stories. Leaping to the rescue only to vanish again into the imagination.